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Preserving Old Research Notes and Documents?
twistedcubic asks: "I have several thousand 8.5 x 11 inch dead tree pages of notes and research that takes up too much storage space. I would like to have all these notes scanned into PDF files (for example) so I can recycle the pages and reclaim storage space. Does anyone know of a store that provides this service, or an inexpensive machine that will do the job in a reasonable amount of time?"
10-year old nephew and a scanner.
Even if you could scan all of them, are you going to just leave named
untitled, untitled-1, untitled-2... untitled-3000
or are you going to rename all of them and organize them in some way? You probably won't find a solution that won't take a lot of time and work.
"Scientists have proof without certainty; Creationists have certainty without proof" -Ashley Montagu
Filing cabinet.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
ADF (Automatic Document Feeder) scanners are fairly pricey (good ones are in the US$400 - US$1000 range, but you can get a cheapie Brother MFC-3240C All-In-One (C$140) that has a 20-page document feeder and then get a slave (e.g. some grad student) to feed in your pages for you.
My Brother MFC-2340C scanner comes with the PaperPort application, which generates PDFs and supports double-sided scanning even though the scanner doesn't support it. (You just flip over the whole stack once you've scanned one side, and start scanning the other side. Paperport knows how to automatically reconcile the pages.)
If you have Acrobat Professional, you can do a Paper Capture(TM) which is basically doing an OCR on the PDF and then storing the recognized words as "keywords" so that the PDF is searchable via Spotlight or other indexing mechanisms.
A document scanner is indeed a very useful piece of equipment -- I use it to scan notes and scrap paper containing rough ideas, often with lots of mathematics. Sometimes writing stuff on paper is just easier than typing in LaTeX...
The eminent computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra also liked to write stuff using pen and paper. His digitized works, called EWDs (after his initials, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra) are available here:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/
Are the notes graphics-heavy (i.e., scientific/engineering)?
If not, give it to a typing service. Once you show them how much "stuff" you have, I'm sure they'll give you a discount. They might even agree to use OpenOffice2 (because it handles huge documents well, the files are small, and it has an excellent PDF exporter).
You'd still have to scan in the pictures/drawing/graphs, and place them appropriately, which will take time.
Also, there are firms that specialize it digitizing paper documents (mostly forms and regularized documents for businesses). Depending on the amount of hand-writing & graphics, it might not be appropriate, though.
All in all, no matter how you do it, the project will
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
You can easily make backups of data on a computer. You could put multiple copies in many places, all around the country or even all around the world. But paper has this annoying habit of losing data easily when it is burned or made wet, and there goes your only copy. If the world trade centre were full of paper, the disaster would have had a much greater impact economically.
How do you store paper in a long term way without copying it? Clue: there isn't one.
You have to copy EVERYTHING to new media eventually. You need to have a plan, and you need to execute it. Simple as that. Paper will disintegrate, and yes, hardware will become obsolete. You just need to progress to the stone in the river before the current one is submerged.
But which is easier/cheaper to propagate to new media and make backup copies? Digital data in open, documented, implement formats, or paper? Which is cheaper and easier to store?
There's also the argument that computers become obsolete. Well, yeah... but I think you would have a hard time finding many computers in the last 25 years that don't have a software emulator around. All you need to do is archive an, ideally, open source emulation of the machine that implements the software, and fire it up to transfer the stuff to the next machine when it becomes necessary.
The only real impediment to survival of data is that it become uninteresting therefore not actively maintained.
In a drawer or filing cabinet.
and what are guarantees that it'll actually stay preserved for that long?
Wet-film microfilm has an estimated survivability of 500 years in ideal conditions and a minimum of 100 years in any reasonable conditions. To my knowledge this exceeds the lifetime of any digital medium.
It's fairly trivial to store redundant copies of your digital files, even in multiple locations worldwide. The costs are minimal too.
It's fairly trivial to store redundant copies of your microfilm, even in multiple locations worldwide. The costs are minimal too.
This is not my sandwich.
Ah, fuck it. I'm tired of doing your research for you. You log in as an AC, then expect a legitimate user to Google "lifetime of microfilm" and "cost of microfilm transfer" because you're too sorry to educate yourself. I no longer see any benefit in changing the relationship between my knowledge and your ignorance.
The only reason use Slashdot as an Anonymous Coward is if you would be fired, arrested, or sued for your post.
This is not my sandwich.
While I'm all for bargaining... I'm pretty sure that it would work out the other way. The Law Firm will pay less due to their volume. Although they usually need it yesterday and may pay a premium for that service.
His one bargaining point is that he likely can wait much longer for his papers to be scanned. So he could negotiate on having his papers on a very low priority queue.